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Even if you purchase your PCAOM brand new, you're still going to end up about 4X cheaper than going with a DPSS solution at 473 nm. Plus you'd have a lot more blue to play with!

How hard is it to power and cool that alc909? Do you need 3 phase power for it? (For sure there are some single-phase supplies that will work with that laser - the Aurora comes to mind, for example...)

If you do need 3 phase power for the supply you've got, do you have a phase converter? (If not, it's going to cost a minimum of a grand to build one, and they are heavy as hell, so it might be cheaper to sell it and buy a single phase supply...)

I guess you hit it on the head... It's all about how much grunt work you want to do. The argon solution will likely be cheaper and certainly will be brighter. But with the PCAOM and all, it's more complex, too.

Since I'm on a super tight budget, and argon is always going to be cheaper than any other source of blue, I'm going to stick with argons. But if I had to set up and tear down a bunch of equipment night after night, then I might be convinced of the benefits of all-solid-state components...

One other thing to consider. If you put the Argon in your whitelight box, that frees up your green dpss, right? So now you can stick that into a separate projector for beams... (Or, better yet, leave your RYG projector alone and just buy a second red diode to go with the multi-line argon.) Of course, this assumes you've got the spare galvos, amps, and controller... (But if you're thinking of dropping $4000 + on a 250mw dpss blue, then you've got enough to buy a set of galvos and amps, and still have enough left for the PCAOM and the second red diode!)

Go solid state... If you need bigger lasers, then rent them as needed.
Spend $4k to get your ~400mW of blue... Big tubes are well suited to fixed
installations... Shipping the systems will eat up any profits quickly.

FYI... The guy who designed the Aurora supply (Gary Stadler) lives a few
minutes south of me down in Del Mar... He's retired from the laser business
though he does make runs down to burning man... In my opinion,
it's a decent early switched PSU design... The coolest part is that the PSU is
aircooled, so all you have to do is run the tube with small a closed loop
chiller... (since the PSU is what traditionally generates the most heat)...

There's two camps about it's robustness in the field, though I've personally
never seen any problems with it firsthand... According to hearsay, the
problems with it are related to how it handles the failure of key components...
basically if an SP265 or similar blow, the PSU is designed to sacrifice itself to
save the tube... in the Aurora, in failure mode, it has the potential to shunt full
power to the tube...

That said, the design of a standard linear passbank is a lot more prone
to failure (the failure of a transistor distributes the load across the remaining
transistors in its bank)... SP265's and similar need constant service and
maintenance to keep them from frying... Not fun even with a curve tracer...

Yadda, I met Gary via an on-line transaction a couple years ago. (He sold me the 3 Isomet AOM's that I have now.) He told me about his participation in Burning Man, and I've followed some of his adventures there via his website.

Did you know that he was one of the guys that did the wormhole effect for the very first Star Trek movie? (The one with "Viger"...) They didn't have galvos that were fast enough to create the effect so they used AOM's to steer the beam around. Evidently they couldn't get more than a degree or two of deflection, but that was enough to pull off the effect. If you run in to Gary, ask him to relay the story sometime - it's fascinating.

Anyway, back to the present. How big can you go with 473 nm blue anyway? (Or, perhaps a better question: at what power level is it no longer cost effective to stay solid state for blue?)